Life

Dvořák was born, the first of nine children, in Nelahozeves, a Bohemian (now Czech) village on the Vltava River north of Prague. He came to know music early, in and about his father’s inn, and became an accomplished violinist as a youngster, contributing to the amateur music-making that accompanied the dances of the local couples. Though it was assumed that he would become a butcher and innkeeper like his father (who also played the zither), the boy had an unmistakable talent for music that was recognized and encouraged. When he was about 12 years old, he moved to Zlonice to live with an aunt and uncle and began studying harmony, piano, and organ. He wrote his earliest works, polkas, during the three years he spent in Zlonice. In 1857 a perceptive music teacher, understanding that young Antonín had gone beyond his own modest abilities to teach him, persuaded his father to enroll him at the Institute for Church Music in Prague. There Dvořák completed a two-year course and played the viola in various inns and with theatre bands, augmenting his small salary with a few private pupils.

The 1860s were trying years for Dvořák, who was hard-pressed for both time and the means, even paper and a piano, to compose. In later years he said he had little recollection of what he wrote in those days, but about 1864 two symphonies, an opera, chamber music, and numerous songs lay unheard in his desk. The varied works of this period show that his earlier leanings toward the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert were becoming increasingly tinged with the influence of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.

Among the students Dvořák tutored throughout the 1860s were the sisters Josefina and Anna Čermáková. The musician fell in love with the elder sister, Josefina, but she did not reciprocate his feelings. The anguish of his unrequited love is said to be expressed in Cypresses (1865), a number of songs set to texts by Gustav Pfleger-Moravský. In November 1873 he married the younger sister, Anna, a pianist and singer. The first few years of the Dvořáks’ marriage were challenged by financial insecurity and marked by tragedy. Anna had given birth to three children by 1876 but by 1877 had buried all of them. In 1878, however, she gave birth to the first of the six healthy children the couple would raise together. The Dvořáks maintained a close relationship with Josefina and the man she eventually married, Count Václav Kounic. After several years of regular visits, they bought a summer house in the small village of Vysoká, where Josefina and the count had settled, and spent every summer there from that point onward. Dvořák composed some of his best-known works there.

In 1875 Dvořák was awarded a state grant by the Austrian government, and this award brought him into contact with Johannes Brahms, with whom he formed a close and fruitful friendship. Brahms not only gave him valuable technical advice but also found him an influential publisher in Fritz Simrock, and it was with his firm’s publication of the Moravian Duets (composed 1876) for soprano and contralto and the Slavonic Dances (1878) for piano duet that Dvořák first attracted worldwide attention to himself and to his country’s music. The admiration of the leading critics, instrumentalists, and conductors of the day continued to spread his fame abroad, which led naturally to even greater triumphs in his own country. In 1884 he made the first of 10 visits to England, where the success of his works, especially his choral works, was a source of constant pride to him, although only the Stabat Mater (1877) and Te Deum (1892) continue to hold a position among the finer works of their kind. In 1890 he enjoyed a personal triumph in Moscow, where two concerts were arranged for him by his friend Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The following year he was made an honorary doctor of music of the University of Cambridge.

Dvořák accepted the post of director of the newly established National Conservatory of Music in New York in 1892, and, during his years in the United States, he traveled as far west as Iowa. Though he found much to interest and stimulate him in the New World environment, he soon came to miss his own country, and he returned to Bohemia in 1895. The final years of his life saw the composition of several string quartets and symphonic poems and his last three operas.

Works

Bedřich Smetana, Dvořák’s senior by 17 years, had already laid the foundations of the Czech nationalist movement in music, but it was left to Dvořák to develop and extend this in an impressive series of works that quickly came to rank in popularity with those of his great German contemporaries. The reasons for Dvořák’s popularity lie in his great talent for melody and in the delightfully fresh Czech character of his music, which offered a welcome contrast to the heavier fare of some of his contemporaries.

Dvořák’s technical fluency and abundant melodic inspiration helped him to create a large and varied output. He composed in all the musical genres and left works that are regarded as classics in all of them, with the possible exception of opera. All Dvořák’s mature symphonies are of high quality, though only the sombre Symphony No. 7 in D Minor (1885) is as satisfactory in its symphonic structure as it is musically. (It should be explained that Dvořák’s mature symphonies were long known as No. 1 to 5, even though he had written four earlier [and unnumbered] ones. All nine of his symphonies have since been renumbered from the traditional order to their actual order of composition.) Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor (From the New World; 1893) remains his best-known work, partly, no doubt, because it was thought to be based on African American spirituals and other influences gained during his years in the United States. Although this may be true to some extent, the music is also characteristically Bohemian in its themes. However, the Symphony No. 9 is in no way superior to the Symphony No. 6 in D Major (1880) or the Symphony No. 8 in G Major (1889) and is actually less characteristic of the composer than these other works. Of the four concerti Dvořák wrote, only the Cello Concerto in B Minor (1895) can safely be called a classic.

In spite of the fact that his work in the medium is sometimes overstrained, Dvořák’s chamber music is also of high quality. The Piano Quintet in A Major (1887) is one of the glories of chamber music, and the string quartets, Opuses 51 (1879), 105 (1895), and 106 (1895), the String Sextet, Opus 48 (1878), and the Dumky Trio, Opus 90 (1891), also rank high. The choral works, so popular when they first appeared, have suffered the fate of most late 19th-century choral music, yet the Stabat Mater (1877) and Te Deum (1892) are among the better examples of their kind. Opera remained the one medium that proved recalcitrant to Dvořák’s genius, though he wrote 10 of them, notably Rusalka (1900). Many of Dvořák’s most attractive works are among his miscellaneous, less-ambitious ones—the Slavonic Dances (1878, 1886) and other piano duets, the Symphonic Variations (1877), the Bagatelles (1878), the Gypsy Songs (1880), and the Scherzo Capriccioso (1883).

Some critics have considered Dvořák’s chief faults to be an overly discursive and repetitive manner, occasional lapses in taste, and a weakness of design in his larger works. Such shortcomings, however, amount to little in the light of the astonishing fertility of his melody and the simplicity and directness with which he achieves his ends. As might be gathered from his music, Dvořák had an attractive personality. He was a humble and deeply religious family man of simple tastes and a great lover of nature.

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